The reason Blackberry is an inferrior device these days

Without a doubt Blackberry devices are probably the most backwards and unfriendly I have ever seen. That might seem like an odd claim, but think about it think about how all the other manufacturer's are inovating right now, then look at RIM and the Blackberry.

The Blackberry is the only smart phone I know of that does not have full builtin support for microsoft exchange. Instead of selecting a server type and then putting your settings in, you need to do one of the following: Buy software for your exchange server, or an application for your desktop.

It makes no sense to do this! Sure you can connect to send email, but your contacts, tasks, and calendar won't hit your phone otherwise. The Palm Pre, and iPhone do this all automatically with no special software.

I mean it is supposed to be popular with business users, and most businesses run exchange for their email. So obviously RIM either does'nt want more corporate users, or is trying to get every penny they can from them.

Let's move on here, and look at the applications. Many of these are best described as clunky or almost non existent in terms of functionality. Not much power to any of the applications, and just navigating to do what you want feels like a chore. For example the rowser on most of them is not a full browser, limts how you can scroll, and seems to have issues loading any web page. The one application that does seem to work well is email, but seriously how COULD you get that wrong?

Next issue I have is with the device itself. It seems like they just want to avoid touch screens altogether, and when they do make models with it the implementation is bad. I saw one model where the entire screen acted like a button, it seemed like sometimes you had to press the screen in for it to acknowledge the on screen keyboard presses, and other times you did'nt. One model had a scroll ball that actually controlled a pointer, where another had a scroll pad that controlled actual scrolling, and moving between text fields.

Just think about it, even between models they can't decide what they want to do, or how to operate. As a programmer I would'nt make anything for a Blackberry because I would have no idea what to expect the user to be capable of, and I don't want to maintain several versions of the same code for different devices.

Research in Motion needs to take a serious look at the Pre, iPhone, and Nexus One if they want to stay in business. Or at least have a device that does more than just email.